Selected Works of Karl Marx

[There follows a passage dealing with the premises of the materialist conception of history. It isnot crossed out and in this volume it is reproduced as Section 2; see pp. 31-32]Ideology in General, German Ideology in ParticularGerman criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Farfrom examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actuallysprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answersbut in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reasonwhy not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of theHegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemicsagainst Hegel and against one another are confined to this - each extracts one side of theHegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted bythe others. To begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as ‘substance’and ‘self-consciousness,’ later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such asspecies ‘the Unique,’ ‘Man,’ etc.The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined tocriticism of religious conceptions. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:]claiming to be the absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continuallyregarded and treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to thesephilosophers. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religiousconsciousness and a religious conception really meant was determined variously as they wentalong. Their advance consisted in subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political,juridical, moral and other conceptions under the class of religious or theological conceptions;and similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological,and the political, juridical, moral man - ‘man’ in the last resort - as religious. The dominance ofreligion was taken for granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced areligious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc. On allsides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The world was sanctified to anever-increasing extent till at last our venerable Saint Max was able to canonise it en bloc andthus dispose of it once for all.The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelianlogical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religiousconceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreementwith the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principlein the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the otherextols it as legitimate.Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products ofconsciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (justas the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the YoungHegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to theirfantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are productsof their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate ofexchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thusof removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand tointerpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. TheYoung-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ statements, are thestaunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for theiractivity when they declare they are only fighting against ‘phrases.’ They forget, however, that tothese phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no waycombating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at thatthoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; allthe rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, inthese unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.